Journal

Saturday, October 11, 2003

No Sleep Till Minneapolis

I am very, very tired. Up at 6:30 am to fly to Frankfurt, which wouldn't have been so bad if the "late dinner" last night in Hamburg scheduled for 10:00pm had happened at 10:00pm, but I was still signing then, so I didn't get to the restaurant until midnight, and got precious little sleep.

Did a lot of interviews today. Most were okay, but one interviewer asked such strange questions it started feeling like some kind of weird wind-up. And I was very tired. But that's still no excuse... (The real answer to "Did you ever meet or interview Douglas Adams when you wrote the book about him?" should actually have been "Of course I did. I interviewed him extensively between 1983 and 1987", and not, as I heard my mouth saying, "No, we never met. I think he was scared of me. I spoke to someone through a closed door at one point who claimed to be Douglas, but I think it was really one of his friends pretending to be him. It was all extremely disturbing.")

Lovely review of Wolves in the Walls in the Guardian.

Finished Will Birch's book "No Sleep Till Canvey Island" on the plane back to Frankfurt, the history of the London Pub Rock scene of the early 70s, and played the first Stiff Records Boxed Set on the iPod, which seemed about right. Good book, filled with excellent anecdotes, including a wonderful lesson in how unrelated people and events can create unintended consequences (in this case, a hippie film-editor with a dream of making a "pleasure dome" on an abandoned Martello Tower who hooked up with a con-man...) although the doomed New York Brinsley Schwartz launch hype is the best set-piece.

The web-site's down right now, so I have no idea when this will go up.

And now I'm going to bed.

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